Computer History for John Wilkinson

When I was in grade school, probably about 3rd grade, my mom brought home an Apple IIe for the summer as part of her school's "Computers on Loan" Program.  We had a word processor, a blackjack game and as no school computer could ever be without it: Oregon Trail.  I was only allowed to go on the computer after dark and this rule was in place for good reason.  From the moment my tiny fingers hit that keyboard I was hooked.  I played around with the computer for hours at a time.  The old green screen would make my eyes burn after a couple of minutes, but I didn't care.  It was so cool that I could type and it would show up immediately on the screen, I could play blackjack (although I was always fuzzy on the rules) and I could shoot buffalo on the Oregon Trail (although I could only carry back 100lbs of the meat :) ).  

At first my mom had to type in the commands to get the programs to load up from the big noisy 5 1/4" floppy disks in the front of the machine, but soon after I had watched her do it a couple of times I was able to log into it by myself and play the night away.  I distinctly remember helping my father boot up the computer after he had tried several times to get the machine to work.  He looked so proud at me when I helped him.  This experience has been replayed countless times in my classroom where students have been able to make the computers do almost anything they wanted with little outside training.  I have a feeling that in a couple of years this will just be even more of a divide between digital natives and those who have come into the technology later in life.

The last thing that was memorable about my first computer experience was when a neighbor and I were playing the blackjack game and we accidentally hit the "-" button when we were typing in our bet.  Suddenly when we lost (the two of us still had not figured out strategy in the game) our total increased instead of decreased.  We tried it a couple of more times and soon we could get to the 10K total the game declared as the goal.  This ignited our imaginations and we spent the better part of two weeks playing with the betting function of the game to see what would happen when we typed in other things.  As our experimenting was really random we did not figure out why the "-" key made our bets act in the reverse of what they should.  I later asked my dad about it and he tried as hard as he could to explain the concept of subtracting a negative number, but I was a little too young to figure it out.

Over all I really enjoy using computers and I believe that this first experience was crucial to developing this love.